James Howard - Contemporary Artists

Untitled

James Howard

Untitled

2007
46 digital prints

Dimensions variable

“All of the images and quite a lot of the text were hijacked from real spam emails in my junk folder. I collaged them together to make new narratives. It’s all done with Photoshop, but I also use other kinds of graphic software that’s been cracked – I try to keep my work quite faithful to how real Internet scammers do it. Spam preys on our insecurities and needs; in the privacy of our own homes everything becomes much more available and dangerous. I often make installations with monitors, but used digital prints for this work to reference the adverts in the back of magazines. It’s like the gallery space can be divided into advertising plots, with wall space sold off by the square metre. I think of this piece as a portrait of today and my work is a sort of on-going social commentary. I work with urgency to get as much of this stuff processed before it’s entirely lost: soon spam filters will be so advanced that we’ll forget what a spam email ever was.”